Explore everyday life in Japan
Japan has a special relationship with food and a strong culture surrounding its eating habits and customs. From an early age, children are taught about the process of growing food. Many nursery schools have small gardens where vegetables are grown, harvested, and then either displayed in the nursery school itself or made available for families to take home. Elementary school students, too, often grow vegetables such as okra and tomatoes at school. They are responsible for watering these vegetables daily and for charting the process of their growth.
In less urban areas, students take field trips out into the rice fields where they plant rice by hand in the spring and reap it by hand in the fall. As they eat the vegetables they have grown or harvested, they are told, These are the delicious tomatoes that you worked so hard to grow, that your sister cared for so well, that Mr. or Mrs. so and so labored over in the heat of August.
Before and after every meal there are standard phrases that almost everyone in Japan says to give thanks for their food. These phrases are itadakimasu and gochisousamadeshita. In schools, where students share a rotating responsibility for leading their fellow students in the giving of thanks for their lunches, they often ask their fellow students to take a second to really feel the meaning of these phrases from the bottom of their hearts. These phrases mean, respectfully, I graciously accept this food and Thank you for the feast.
Mottainai is a Japanese word that has a number of uses and can be translated a number of ways, but when it comes to food, probably the easiest way to translate it is to think of it as meaning either What a waste, or Don’t waste that. Not eating all of the food on your plate in Japan can be very inconsiderate, not only to your host, but also to all of the people who were involved in bringing that food to your plate. If you come to Japan and you hear a man or a woman saying, Mottainai! in regard to food, you can be sure that what he or she means is this: All the effort that was put into growing that food, harvesting it, shipping it, buying it, and preparing it, and you don’t even have the decency to eat it all? What a waste!
In addition, if somebody in Japan makes a strange sounding comment about how clean your plate is, meaning how well you have eaten every morsel of food on your plate, or how well you have eaten the fish or the chicken meat from their bones, accept this as a true compliment.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting daily updates about life in Japan, please consider following me. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.